The value of international scientific collaborations

Scientific research doesn’t proceed within countries unconnected as if isolated islands. It is a worldwide collaboration. And for success, countries must be part of this collaboration. Andrew Holmes and Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt feature in this public forum hosted by the University of Melbourne and The Australian Academy of Science discussing the value of scientific research and the way the worldwide collaboration strengthens everyone involved.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Brian Schmidt from Mount Stromlo in Canberra showed that the universe is expanding forever, and fast, and for that he got a Nobel Prize last year. Join us on stage at a public forum at the University of Melbourne, put on by the Australian Academy of Science, with Professor Andrew Holmes, foreign secretary of the Academy, to ask this question; how much do we depend on international connections to maintain the standards of our science? And will the cuts to the international program be crippling? Brian Schmidt starts the story.

Brian Schmidt: Well, as most people know, I grew up in the United States and so one of the things that enabled me to come here to Australia at the end of 1994 was the great reputation that Mount Stromlo, the place I ended up going to, had and it had that on the international stage and it had that because I routinely met the great astronomers from that institution when they came to where I, for example, was, at Harvard. And so that was ultimately one of the things that attracted me to Australia and to Mount Stromlo was knowing that things were going on, they were interesting, and that if I were to go there I would not be lost on the other side of the world.

Robyn Williams: And when you turned up? Disappointed or otherwise?

Brian Schmidt: No, when I showed up I first realised that, boy, it's a very long aeroplane flight across the Pacific, and international travel was going to lose its lustre very quickly. But I also realised that the university ensured that I was supported to do that travel when necessary, and those really gave me the ability to use telescopes around the world, not just those in Australia but ones in Chile, ones in Hawaii, and that was what allowed the discovery that I made to happen.

Andrew Holmes: I think I read in one of our earlier reports that the last totally Australian invention was probably the stump jump plough. And since those days, science has become global in a way that it wasn't for that particular invention. And the Henry Review, as many of you know, is addressing what is becoming called the Asian century. We're 10 years into the Asian century, and one of the questions it asks is; what contribution can we make competitively in science to the Asian century with the developments going on in China and India particularly? So we have this opportunity I think to take advantage of what I personally think is about a ten-year window to build on that collaborative and competitive opportunity.

Robyn Williams: An awful lot of people tell me and critics say it's simplistic, that with China producing something like a million graduates in science a year and 400,000 graduates in engineering a year, well, pretty soon at that rate we're going to be bystanders.

Andrew Holmes: Yes, and what's interesting is...and all of us in this room probably have personal experience of that, at this moment our relationship with China is hugely valued by China. The Australian Academy of Sciences has had a memorandum of understanding with China for the last 30 years, I think it preceded formal government bilateral relationships. So at the moment many Chinese come to work with us, and I think we have this opportunity to repeat what happened in a different way in the Colombo Plan, that is to seed collaborative relationships which will endure for a long time.

Robyn Williams: So we have plenty to contribute for them and they similarly for us.

Andrew Holmes: Yes, that's right, I think we have a lot to contribute in each direction.

Brian Schmidt: In astronomy, as in most other fields, China is a rapidly emerging, as is Korea, Japan is a little more established. And so within, for example, the telescope realm, we are working with Korea to build the next generation telescope, a 25-metre telescope that will allow us to look further, fainter, and with more resolution than any other telescope. And so Korea is a natural partner. And part of going on to what was just said, that the relationships with Korea were established 25 years ago, before Korea emerged, because many of their astronomers were trained here in Australia and particularly at Mount Stromlo. And so that is one of the ways to ensure that you have a lasting relationship, is by getting in at the ground floor and building up a trust and a mutual dependence at some level that endures, even when you are no longer the elephant in the room but the dwarf.

Robyn Williams: Some people when they're talking to me about brain drains, as if it's a bad thing, forget the fact that what you should do with your brain that's drained is keep it on a bit of a leash, keep in touch, make sure that the young person is aware that we're thinking of you back here and that any time you're ready to nip back there is a place for you. So you can drain your brain, but then you can pull it back, as with Bryan Gaensler, he's a great example, who went to your place, to Harvard I think at the age of about 14 he was a professor, the most extraordinarily young person. And he came back and he's doing fantastic things, isn't he, at the University of Sydney.

Brian Schmidt: Yes, that's right. When we talk about brain drain, we never talk about the brain gain, and so Australia is pretty close to that place where for every person that leaves, someone comes back, and that's all about being engaged internationally. If you're a place which is at the cutting edge, then it's easy to get people to come here. And certainly over the last 10 years I've seen the ability, partially because the world is a smaller place, but our ability to track people from overseas is very much stronger than it used to be.

Andrew Holmes: And Robyn, if I can just give a plug, we have here in Victoria an initiative that's been supported by the previous and the present government to recruit Australians back to Australia, to Victoria particularly, and it's another example of those linkages that are built on because there is a desire to make use of people who have had experience abroad, bring them back to do things here.

Robyn Williams: And there are places, are there? Because I know that there is an awful fuss being made by the chief scientist, Ian Chubb, about how many more of these professionals in science and engineering we need. But are there the jobs?

Andrew Holmes: I think one of the great things that's happened in the lifetime of the present government is to create opportunities for early career researchers and the future fellows and so on. So at that stage, yes. I think if we can build on our international collaborations in translational science, there will be jobs that they can take forward.

Robyn Williams: Now, that's the problem, linking a bright idea in science to a product, translational, to make an application, is, as someone once said, the same connection as between prayer and deliverance. Is there a way that you can actually talk to people in government, in industry, to show that that connection works?

Andrew Holmes: There is, but I'm going to answer it indirectly by quoting two former presidents of the Royal Society who said there is applied science and science that one day will be applied. That's an imperfect answer to a world that should be more perfect. If we knew everything that we were going to do would be applied at the time we did it, many people would be happy. But there is some excitement about curiosity driven research that gives you an outcome you didn't expect as well. We need vitally...everyone in the world needs the opportunity to engage with international partners. So yes, provided we have that access.

Robyn Williams: Could you give the example of the two last Prime Minister's Science Prizes? Andrew, you first with the last one which was in polymers.

Andrew Holmes: Yes, that's a very good example. We lead the world in polymer science and this is well recognised. And two colleagues...I declare a conflict of interest because I am also employed by the CSIRO, but my colleagues at CSIRO, as they were then, Ezio Rizzardo and David Solomon, won a prize, the Prime Minister's Prize, for showing how you can control polymer shape and the way in which polymers form their morphology. And this technology has now gone into a lot of industry. These additives, they just change the way in which the bulk polymer behaves.

And I heard last week an example that is being employed by our friends in IBM who of course are investing very heavily here in Melbourne, that if you can do that to control pores of what are called nano porous materials, you can actually sequence DNA by only allowing certain building blocks of DNA to go through the holes, and you can quickly read out the sequence of the DNA. So that kind of polymer science allows you build structures which are on the nanoscale, the 10-9 metre scale.

Robyn Williams: On a big scale however it is also essential to the plastics industry, so it's used virtually everywhere plastics are being produced, so it's worth billions to the country.

Andrew Holmes: And their value is as additives, as small components, specialist materials that change the bulk property by adding just a small amount. So it's very clever science in controlling the way in which polymer building blocks organise themselves.

Robyn Williams: If you go to the Prime Minister's Science Prize the year before, imagine a team looking for small black holes and you think, oh gosh, what are they going to do next? It's like one of those little jokes about the minister having a small professor coming, 'I want to look for small black holes, could you fund me for 20 years?' Tell me what happened.

Brian Schmidt: Back in the 1970s…Australia is also one of the leaders in radio astronomy around the world, as I think most people realise, and so a group were looking for the thing that Stephen Hawking is most famous for, which is the idea that you can get what we call Hawking radiation and a black hole can evaporate. And so when a black hole evaporates it should right at the very end give a flash, a very bright flash that you can see across the galaxy and even potentially the universe. And so John O'Sullivan was working on these things and, as Einstein said, if we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be called research, and that's exactly what happened, he was out looking for this stuff and he never found those black holes.

So where did that leave him? Well, it led him to the idea that you could use the technique he was using to look for those black holes to do something which we would say was out of the box which was to combine the signals from a bunch of radio transmitters and combine them in a room as they bounced around, get a signal, which we now call wi-fi. So evaporating black holes, which were never discovered, led to this out-of-the-box unexpected discovery of how to do wi-fi very easily, and we use it everywhere right now. One of the most profitable patents ever in the history of Australia, completely unexpected.

Robyn Williams: Last time I checked it was used in 600 million laptops, and by now probably a billion or more. Just imagine what that is worth! But how often, Brian, does that kind of innovation pay off from basic science? Is it one in a million, one in 100 or what?

Brian Schmidt: Well, I can't tell you if it is one in 100 or one in a million because the scale of the inventions are of all sizes. Those great big ones like that, and there are smaller ones. The polymers are another one that came out of basic research. But the other question is what happens if you didn't do these things? And if you don't do them, then you don't get new ideas, you keep on doing things you already know how to do, which means that you make a better toaster, you don't come up with a new idea of a microwave oven. And so if you want revolution you've got to let people go through and do things that they don't know the answer to, and that's the beauty of it. And in terms of understanding what's interesting, that's where the international aspect comes in, because there are more than 6 billion people on this planet, and there are a lot of ideas out there, and if you just sit here in Australia, our 23 million people, you need to be able to put those ideas together, and that is something that happened in the case of wi-fi. O'Sullivan was off in the Netherlands and did a lot of the work and was able to bring ideas, and there were ideas that came through many, many places to actually combine to what we ended up with.

Robyn Williams: There is an attitude, is there not Andrew, that something involving a plane to go overseas must be a junket?

Andrew Holmes: I think that's the case, particularly for those of us who live in Australia because we need to travel for everything we do, so people assume that travel is associated with holidays. But I think what many people are surprised about is that international collaboration is a very competitive practice, and we need to be at the sharp end of that to deliver. The argument that is often presented is that we contribute 3% of the world's science knowledge, and by international partnership we have access to the other 97%. That is a powerful argument. The other one I think that we need to think about is that we're funding something like $9.4 billion across the science base in Australia in science and technology, but if we don't allow access to that international component, we can't take full advantage and validate what we're doing.

Robyn Williams: What is stopping us? Could you explain what happened in June last year and why it's a kind of turning point?

Andrew Holmes: What we must say first of all is that what is in place at the moment is a $50 million over five-year program for collaboration with India, and a $9 billion program for collaboration with China. Clearly two highly important components of our partnership. But the studies that have been produced show that we're actually a little bit under in our collaborations with many areas of continental Europe. We're good with Great Britain for historical reasons, and France is quite strong, but Germany we're under in terms of proportion compared with the benchmark in the world. The United States as well, strangely. We've been good, as Brian said, with Korea historically. And we face the challenge of relying on individuals to maintain those links, and individuals will, but we're missing the holistic government contribution at the moment.

Robyn Williams: And what would you like to see happen to put that right?

Andrew Holmes: We've published the working document on global innovation, and our recommendation in that paper is that we spend over 10 years, $250 million, on funding competitive international collaboration primarily enabling our early career researchers to establish serious partnerships which will then allow them to build into their next ARC grant the international component of a project. The Research Council grant or the National Health and Medical Research Council grant enables as a small part international collaboration, but it doesn't enable an early career researcher to get going.

Brian Schmidt: I think most scientists are at their most creative at this age, when they're finishing their PhD and going on into their first job. And so we build the future relationships that will underpin things for 20 or 30 years, and so when you do meet people it's amazing to see the network that they have built up. They're able to bring that knowledge back and extend essentially that web of interactions to their colleagues. And so it's quite an impressive thing to be able to do.

And so I think when we really look at it, it only makes sense. If we really want to capture the ability to really capture the benefit of all this work we're doing, we have to engage internationally. But I believe we've sort of slowed down and we need to get the foot on the accelerator again.

Robyn Williams: Say we've got some innovations in laboratories in Australia in solar power and we're looking towards products, and I think you've got something that you've been working on, what are the chances that that could be developed as a piece of technology that would actually be developed and manufactured in Australia?

Andrew Holmes: Let me start by just illustrating this example, which is a printable solar cell, so not silicon, it's actually made of plastic and you can actually bend it, I won't bend it too much. What I wanted to use here to illustrate this is the fact that when we started this project in Australia, we had virtually no experience in the area, but because of our international partnerships and actually funding through the previous program, we were able to call in the leading partners in the UK, the United States and also Singapore, and build up a component here...the idea is if I shine light on this it should make the fans turn...it was very good in the sunlight out there, it even worked in the Oxford sunshine in February earlier this year. So it's pretty powerful, and we could not have reached that level of a printable solar cell without those international partnerships. That's the first point.

The second point is you mentioned Dr Shi who is a former colleague of Martin Green's in the University of New South Wales, is now one of the richest men in China, and the technology is University of New South Wales technology. Okay, it's cheaper to make them in China, but that very strong link between the University of New South Wales and Suntech Power Holdings has enabled technology transfer in both directions to continue. We want to give new opportunities to our local printing industry, just like we do with printing banknotes. Whether it will stay here or go offshore I think is of less importance than the revenue return and the investment in knowledge continues here. So I think it can be done, but it won't all be here, even if we pull this off.

Robyn Williams: No, but the relationship has been worked out, has it, as to how our bright ideas travel and how the rewards come back?

Andrew Holmes: I think we get it, I think we understand that we protect the intellectual property and we exploit it and we make sure that our best and most able people bump into the best and most able people abroad, whether it's in Lindau or whether it's working in a laboratory for six months on an exchange. But we need to be able to make that happen.

Brian Schmidt: And I think it's worthwhile just contemplating, the biggest company in the world right now is Apple, and Apple doesn't manufacture anything, they have people manufacture it. So the ideas are really where the value is for a country like Australia, and it doesn't mean that we can't do the high-end part of the manufacturing. So the beginnings of that are going to be very hard. It's the same type of technology that, for example, they used to do these polymer notes potentially. So that is something we can be good at.

We don't want to do the low value-add stuff because we're a rich country and we want to remain rich. We want to do this stuff where we can take that and then add it into something extra, which they can't do in China, and that is where really integrating I guess our know-how into the international scene is the important part. We need to know where we are placed, strategically work around that and then do the developments that are natural for Australia to do well.

Robyn Williams: And the scale could be fantastic. If you just think of the SKA which you may go to Africa or may come to Australia, and the announcement may be in a few days time, there we're looking at, for example, not just $2 billion worth of technology, but some people have said enough computing power equivalent to all the computers we use today. A staggering amount of number-crunching going on when the thing's established at the end of maybe 2016, 2020.

Brian Schmidt: Australia has been leading radio astronomy for decades here, it goes back to the 1940s even. And whether or not the square kilometre array is in Australia or it's in Africa, it needs to be built. And you could ask yourself the question; do you want to be doing the high-tech things that are uniquely applicable, for example, to telecommunication, which could be built anywhere? Or do you want to be doing the cement?

Now, even if it comes to Australia, I mean, the cement is good, that's a great part and it's great to have it here, but if it goes to South Africa for some reason, which I hope it doesn't, I think it should stay here, it doesn't actually make any difference for the real value to the country because we have been right at the forefront of how to make a radio telescope like that. We can still do all that development, we can still capture all the benefits. And so we need to really think about why the square kilometre array is interesting. It's interesting because it is this big goal that is going to be really hard and will push us, and we are uniquely positioned right now to take that and run with it. We shouldn't be scared, no matter where it goes.

Robyn Williams: And the Australian government has been supporting that over the years, both the coalition and also the...

Brian Schmidt: Yes, the square kilometre array has received amazing support from all aspects of government, the bureaucracy. And so I think Australia should be really proud about how we've done that. And win or lose, we will win because of what we've done.

Robyn Williams: What would you like to see happen next?

Andrew Holmes: We've tried to think of new programs like allowing industrial partners, for example, to have access to European Union programs. There we know that the multiplier on the investment is a factor of 30 just in terms of the resource. So for an investment of $1 you get access to $30 worth of science in an international partnership.

We would like to see this program primarily supporting young people and also allowing us to provide science envoys to promote Australian science through our Department of Foreign Affairs. And Brian can tell you about his examples on a number of occasions.

Brian Schmidt: Yes, it's quite remarkable, Australia has two envoys, one in Europe and one in the United States. And before and since the Nobel Prize I have to admit I knew both of these people and have dealt with them on a whole range of things, the square kilometre array, but also all sorts of issues to deal with making astronomy stronger, the links so we can better access the facilities overseas.

So, for example, this year I'm going to China where we don't have an envoy. So I'm going to be spending several weeks in China, but my schedule is being dictated by the Chinese Academy rather than some strategic view that we would have here in Australia. And if we had an envoy there, I promise you, we would be dictating what was going on and we would be able to maximise the benefit when I go to China for Australia. So I think that is a real strategic opportunity lost.

Robyn Williams: Questions, statements, soliloquies?

Question: I've found the discussion incredibly interesting so far, so thank you. I actually chair the Early-Mid-Career Researchers Forum for the Australian Academy of Science, and the Academy has established this forum because they do recognise the challenges that early-mid-career researchers face. And I think certainly global engagement is one of those challenges and how do young people get out there. And you've highlighted some of the very promising programs and initiatives that aim to address that. But given that around one in five early-mid-career researchers will actually end up staying in research long-term, what do you see for those other four individuals and how they could potentially engage globally? What sorts of roles could you potentially seek for them, perhaps as envoys or something?

Andrew Holmes: That's a really good question. What happens in the United States is that quite a lot of people that you've described serve as interns in the National Academy of Sciences or in government agencies. So they provide, if you like, this early link interface between active researchers and those involved with science policy and science funding. We think that is something we should be promoting and we've already raised it locally in our solar cell partnership which involves CSIRO, Monash and Melbourne, with the Victorian State government, that we would like to place some of our researchers into government as interns. And I think that's one of the opportunities that they could follow.

Robyn Williams: John Swan.

John Swan: Perhaps the greatest example of successful global engagement, and it led to a famous book called The Greatest Invention of All Time and it dealt entirely with radar. Radar won the Second World War. Okay, the atomic bomb finished it, but radar won it. And it was entirely driven by several major groups of international scientists who collaborated throughout the entire war, and they went from 12-metre, 10-metre, 6-metre, 4-metre, 2-metre, 1-metre radar, 50-centimetres radar, 3-centimetres radar, all of them getting better and better at finding out how many planes were coming, how to get rid of the doodlebugs and how to solve the many, many problems that faced countries at war. And they did it so well that none other than Hermann Göring once was known to have said to his boss Hitler, 'When we win the war, I'm going to buy only British radios, because they know far more about it than we do.'

Why was it so successful? Well, one of the reasons was that Vannevar Bush, who got everybody going at Harvard and particularly at MIT, had a very good friend who was the President of the United States, and all the very vast sums of money needed came directly from the President's desk. And similarly in Britain when collaborative groups were set up there to assist and be partners with the American effort, none other than Mr Churchill was likewise very supportive indeed.

If we are to consider global engagement for our future scientists, we have to say what is the problem, and I suggest there are two very serious problems. One of them is the enormous growth in our population, leading potentially to 9 billion people in another 50 years. And the other one is producing more and more very necessary electricity with, at the same time, making less and less contributions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

These two problems—over-population and the greenhouse gas problem—both are international problems. They're not the problems of any one country, and they demand social and global and scientific engagement. Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Thank you John Swan. Well, as we know from history, the war did finish, Germany did not win, but the radar guys came almost in a bunch across to Australia and helped invent radio astronomy, led by a Welshman called Taffy Bowen, which was rather good, and they gave as the microwave oven, thank you John Swan. But of course 100 years later the situation is rather different. The thing I want to ask you about the example from John Swan, is the Joseph Schumpeter burning deck theory; why does it always take either a crisis or a war to get people going? It's interesting that during the war you had antibiotics, penicillin with Florey in an incredibly short time, and radar, again, in just a few years, and there are other examples as well, and it happens to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing who helped invent computers in the blink of an eye practically. Is there a way, Brian Schmidt, of possibly taking that example of the radar people and looking at the challenges of today, the international ones, and seeing how we can do it without the burning deck?

Brian Schmidt: That's a sociological question of course and it requires leadership at the highest level, it requires leaders of the world to get together and say this is a big thing that we're willing to put money into. If you're willing to put 0.1% of GDP into a big question, you will get answers. War, you're willing to put 10% of GDP into answers, and yes, that gives you the ability to focus, martial every resource of a country to answer a question.

Robyn Williams: And by implication, Andrew, both of the things that John Swan was mentioning require international collaboration.

Andrew Holmes: They do, and we already call this solar cell project a Manhattan Project.

Robyn Williams: Tony Klein from the University of Melbourne, you have the microphone.

Tony Klein: I don't think it's all to do with the burning deck effect. Quite important things come out of the blue, out of left field, out of pure research, and two of the most esoteric areas of physics—particle physics and astronomy—have given rise to enormously important contributions, the world wide web in the case of particle physics, and what is not universally recognised, everybody's digital camera was first developed at University College London by some guy who wanted it for astronomy. And it went from astronomy into what are we now have in everybody's camera.

Robyn Williams: Shall we take that as a comment?

Question: To take the discussion back to the comment made about scientific diplomacy, and wondering whether there aren't other linkages that could be made to assist that process, that one of the things…having been an international civil servant myself for many years, one of the things that Australia was not very good at is making linkages between its scientists and its diplomats, particularly in engaging in collaboration. And one of the things...I know our Australian diplomats are often criticised as being few in number and not broad enough in their thinking, but whether there is isn't some form of engagement, and are there opportunities that we are missing out on in this kind of scientific diplomacy field by not linking up across our scientists, our researchers, our diplomats, and leveraging some of those linkages better.

Andrew Holmes: Very important, and they are mentioned in our working document. This academy that we're representing today has had the benefit of receiving some seed funding from both DFAT and what was DESA, I think they now call it 'desert', for exactly the kind of communication that you suggested in which one of our leading scientists, and in this case we had three, and Ian Frazer from DFAT, went to a certain region and talked about their science and they did it with the support and engagement of the local mission. We know that this has worked well because we've had many positive responses back from ambassadors and people involved in the relevant admissions about how much they value that event and how they want to contribute more. That's one of our recommendations. Brian can tell you about his first experience as Australia's ambassador at large.

Brian Schmidt: I've had obviously a lot of experience in the last few months being able to do things. So the envoy, for example, in the United States arranged for me to provide a presentation, actually organised before the announcement of the Nobel Prize, in Washington DC, where you sort of got all of Washington DC and Kim Beazley hosting me, and meet up with a bunch of people in US companies who are interested in this joint telescope project we're working on and how Australian and US companies could work together to make this happen. But also people from, for example, DARPA, which specialises in doing blue-sky research within a defence sphere. And so DARPA is, for example, interested in bringing out a $200 million facility to Australia. Whether or not it actually happens is to be determined. But $200 million facility to our country based on discussions they've been having, plus at Mount Stromlo and the Defence Department and things. So those are the type of things that happen.

Another thing is last week I was in Hawaii and was giving a talk, again related to telescopes, the Keck telescopes which I used to help make this discovery that our team made of the accelerating universe. And these telescopes were funded by philanthropy, by the William Keck foundation. And at this there were a bunch of people who were worth a lot of money who were interested in astronomy. And one of them, Gordon Moore, Moore's Law, founder of Intel, about $10 billion worth of person, are very interested in science and what we're doing, and another 100 people who sort of collectively added up to that $10 billion.

And so by using these envoys we can get Australian scientists connected up with these very influential people. Most of these people were venture capitalists, they said, 'Do you have any ideas of venture capitals in Australia?' And so those are the linkages you're trying to get, you're trying to connect the world up, and they are looking for opportunities and quite frankly I know there are great opportunities here in Australia because we have so much good basic research and so few innovations out of it right now compared to what we should have, that there are huge opportunities for the right mix of skills there.

Robyn Williams: How did you come to be in touch with Obama and Bono?

Brian Schmidt: Well, one of the things you get to do when you win a Nobel Prize is you get to meet the Prime Minister of Australia, but you also get invited to the Oval Office. And so back on 1 December I got summoned with the other six US Nobel Prize winners of 2011, I'm a dual citizen, to the Oval Office and we got to talk to the President. The President when he entered the room said, 'It is so nice to be with a bunch of people who actually deserve to win a Nobel Prize,' which is quite startling, it was like, whoa, okay. Anyway, he was charming.

And on the way out, my son, who himself became famous when the President visited Australia in October because he went and saw me give a talk rather than the President who he had been selected unknowingly to meet at his school in Canberra. So he was the kid who missed school on the wrong day. So he was very upset. He came in with me, and on the way out he was saying, 'Isn't that Bono?' and I said, 'Yeah, it is.' And he said, 'Can I go talk to him?' And I said, 'No, give the poor guy a break.' So we walked off and all of a sudden Bono was, like, 'Hey, come back here, come back here, I want to talk to you.' So Bono summoned us back, and he knew everything about the accelerating universe you could possibly know, and he had no idea he was going to meet us. So he was an amazing guy.

Robyn Williams: And he's telling the story about you back home.

Brian Schmidt: Well, we'll see.

Robyn Williams: Question over there?

Ziggy Switkowski: Robyn, Ziggy Switkowski who you know to be a badly out of date former physicist. I wondered if I could draw the panel out a bit more on this issue of brain drain, which another way of viewing that might be as it being an important and valuable export industry of a renewable resource. And I just wonder whether the production and the export of our people is a measure of the success of our educational systems here and our research and development efforts, particularly in a world that is increasingly connected and reachable with modern communications. So I would see a brain drain as evidence of success rather than as something to worry about.

Andrew Holmes: I couldn't agree more. I like the philosophy that I think universities in the United States have, is they're very happy to send their best undergraduates to do a doctorate somewhere else, as long as they get back equally good people to replace them. So I'm very happy for our best people to work abroad, as long as we can attract equally good people here and that exchange can keep going in both directions.

Jenny Graves: What is it going to take to convince the government to invest more in global engagement in science? I know when I was a foreign secretary at the academy I was always being asked for stories, and I use international genomics as a story about how we put a tiny, tiny amount into it and we got back enormous amounts of help from overseas. But it doesn't seem to be getting home. So what extra do we need to argue?

Robyn Williams: Andrew, what extra? Especially now, just before the federal budget. Your timing is exquisite.

Andrew Holmes: Jenny's timing is perfect. I acknowledge Jenny's enormous contributions as my predecessor. Jenny, the case has been made. I think the impact case and the case to get past people who control the money is probably the most important thing we have to do, and we understand that the argument is that for an investment of 0.25%, one-quarter of a percent of our $9.5 billion budget per annum in international partnerships we can get that huge leverage, as I said, somewhere between 6- and 20-fold in terms of the return, 30-fold in joining an EU partnership. So they're the ones that I think are going to win the case now, that is the return on the investment.

Brian Schmidt: Yes, and just to follow on, stories are good, you need to have those as the background to sell the piece, but ultimately you need sound policy advice. And the academy is trying to do a good job on that, but we can also encourage treasury, productivity commission and finance to go through and do the numbers themselves, let them figure it out. And I think the arguments are pretty straightforward. You are foolish to invest $9.5 billion without including an international component since it is so central to leveraging and getting spill-overs from that money, which is what the government is putting in there for the first point. So you really just need the bureaucracy at some point go in and force them to run the numbers so that they know it's the right thing to do.

Andrew Holmes: If I might personally on behalf of all of you congratulate Brian on winning the Nobel Prize in physics, we're so proud of you Brian, it's fantastic.

[Applause]

Brian Schmidt: Thank you. Just to say, Australia's been a great place for me to come, and I honestly believe if I had not immigrated here I would have not won the Nobel Prize.

Robyn Williams: Brian Schmidt from Mount Stromlo and Andrew Holmes from the Australian Academy of Science, asking will our research suffer if cuts to international links are maintained. The forum was at the University of Melbourne, and the budget is on Tuesday. I'm Robyn Williams.

Credits

Comments (1)

Warwick Anderson :

08 May 2012 9:41:48am

I am in awe of your ability to maintain such a high standard – content, “listenability” – over so many years. Long may it continue. I have a correction to a comment Andrew Holmes made about NHMRC and our (in his views lack of) support of international research in Saturday’s interview. In fact, we have extensive and long standing support, including specifically in the area he claimed we did not! Since Andrew is from CSIRO and so not a major recipient of our funding, he can be forgiven (perhaps! –though it’s hardly a secret and most of the schemes below have been in existence for years). Here are a few matters where we support international collaboration: 1. For over two decades, NHMRC has supported postdoctoral fellows to study overseas through “early Career Fellowships” known as CJ Martin, Sidney Sax and Neil Hamilton Fairly Fellowships. These provide NHMRC funding for two years in an overseas lab (anywhere) and then two years back in Australia. At any one time, we have hundreds of postdocs all around the world on these Fellowships. Many current Australian leaders in health and medical research have been recipients of these Fellowships. 2. We also have specific postdoctoral Fellowship exchange programs with China and France. 3. We have collaborative research funding for schemes with the EU, California (Institute of regenerative Medicine) and staring soon Singapore (infectious diseases). 4. We fund into two major international collaborative research schemes – the International Cancer Genome Consortium (with around 20 other countries) and the Global (research) Alliance for Chronic Disease (NIH, CIHR, UK MRC, SA’s MRC, Indian MRC, and China AMS). 5. We pay Australia’s subscription to the Human Frontiers Science Program (cutting edge science, established by Japan, now around 15 member countries). Health and medical research is of course international and with the flexibility that we provide in our funding grants, almost half Australian health and medical research publications have at least one international author.